Region: National
200 Days & Counting: Executive Orders
Trump loves issuing executive orders. Mostly, they don’t mean much.
Trump has issued a flood of executive orders. Many of them are “full of sound and fury. . . signifying nothing.” They actually concern actions that he doesn’t have the power to take himself. Instead, they relate to responsibilities that Congress gave to an administrative agency like EPA, not the White House. There are a …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days and Counting: Public Lands
The potential impact of a Trump Administration on our federal public lands.
The federal government owns almost one-third of the land in the United States, primarily concentrated in the Western states. In addition, the federal government is the primary manager of the oceans off the coast of the United States (with the exception of oceans within three miles of the coastline, which are primarily under state authority). …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days & Counting: Enforcing Environmental Laws
Don’t expect the Administration to take the lead in enforcement. Others will need to step up.
As the Bush Administration learned, it can be difficult to pass new legislation or enact new regulations. But another way of gutting environmental rules is much easier: just stop enforcing them. An agency’s enforcement decisions receive essentially no judicial review and precious little publicity. Cuts in enforcement budgets receive even less public notice and are …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days & Counting: Pollution and Climate Change
Trump and Pruitt want to take an ax to EPA regulation. That will be harder than they think.
Rolling back EPA regulations is one of the Trump Administration’s priorities. The most notable example is Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which aimed to cut CO2 emissions from power plants. The other rule that has gotten considerable attention is the so-called WOTUS rule, which defines federal jurisdiction to regulate wetlands and watersheds. But these are not …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days and Counting: Budget
What are the implications of changes to the federal budget for environmental law?
The Trump Administration has proposed draconian cuts to a range of environmental and science agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior, NASA’s climate science work, and NOAA’s science and regulatory programs. Here we’ll talk about the potential implications of dramatic budget cuts, and then the likelihood they will occur, at least for …
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CONTINUE READINGSetback for EPA in Regulating Gases with High Global Warming Potential
DC Circuit vacates 2015 rule on HFCs
Today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a 2015 EPA rule targeting the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a class of potent greenhouse gases that are used as refrigerants and propellants for a variety of purposes as a substitute for ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). The court’s decision is a setback for President Obama’s …
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CONTINUE READINGGuest Blogger Justin Pidot: Two Years after Gold King Disaster, Trump Would Slash Funding for Abandoned Mines Cleanup
Congress Should Ensure that Money Is Available to Address Pollution on Public Lands
In recent legal battles, the State of Utah has rarely sided with the environment. It is a significant moment, therefore, when Utah files a lawsuit aimed to force polluters to pay for contamination they have caused, as it did last week when it sued mine owners and contractors for the EPA related to the Gold …
CONTINUE READING200 Days and Counting: Legislation
What are the prospects for major environmental legislation in the near future?
From the perspective of environmental law, one of the most important questions is whether full Republican control of Congress and the White House would lead to fundamental changes to significant environmental laws. These are the kinds of changes that would be most important over the long-run, from a legal perspective. Laws are hard to pass …
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CONTINUE READING200 Days and Counting: Intro
The start of a series on the future of environmental law after 200 days of the Trump Administration
As of August 6, President Trump has been in office for 200 days. When he was elected and inaugurated, there was a great deal of concern about what his Presidency might mean for environmental law. We’ve now gone about 1/8 through his first-term, so we have a little better sense of what the future might …
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CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Proposed repeal of BLM fracking rule
BLM Proposes to Rescind 2015 Rule on Hydraulic Fracturing
On July 25, 2017 the Bureau of Land Management published in the Federal Register a proposed rule that would rescind the Obama Administration’s 2015 Rule titled “Oil and Gas; Hydraulic Fracturing on Federal and Indian Lands.” This proposal has been anticipated since the Interior Department announced in March earlier this year that the Department intended …
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